Looking forward to seeing what images they received, especially after Avi Loeb's comments on it.
He's also a well respected and very accomplished person who has acknowledged this is a comet.
If it happens to slow down and change trajectory after it passes behind the sun, he might change his tune but he's pretty focused on the science at this point.
But ask yourself where we'd be if noone ever asked what if.
There's a reason he called his project to observe anomalous phenomenon The Galileo Project. Ring a bell?
Sure, like the Patriot Act was about patriotism.
"What if it's a natural object?" - We're going to observe it.
That's it. It's all we can reasonably do for now. It changes nothing.
An open mind is like a fortress with its gates unbarred and its walls unguarded.a side effect of questioning what is inside leads to allowing some of what is outside in.
Ellie is someone I would consider having an open mind. She dedicates her work, at great risk to her own career, finding signs of extraterrestrial life. Despite everyone telling her not to waste time and resources on it. But she does and she does it by collecting the evidence first, and when she got it, double and triple checked it before making the announcement.
Avi kind of does the opposite. He hypes his ideas up first, often taking credit for others' work, without sufficient evidence.
Perfect and brutal.
But I also think the question "what if it wasn't" is useful to consider.
I'd label anyone unwilling to discuss that topic a crank, not the other way round.
Loeb goes quite a bit further than that.
I've been through the last ~10 or ~15 posts on his Medium this evening, to check. Sentence-by-sentence I don't see anything that goes beyond "what if". Can you share some of the quotes you have in mind?
I think this is an interesting phenomenon, because it seems that lots of people throw personal insults at him (not saying that's you btw) without addressing the meat of whatever they're reacting to.
And lest we forget! One of the founding essays [1] of this very website discusses it: if you're slinging ad hominem attacks or personal insults around, you're by definition losing the "argument" (not that I think this qualifies as an "argument").
He's definitely turned into a "I'm just asking questions and keeping an open mind" kinda grifter, whatever his past qualifications and respectability
Apparently Wow! came from the same area and seemingly was blue-shifted by an amount that could make sense from an approaching craft, so that doesn't sound that silly to me.
Unlikely to be the real cause, not silly.
It seems more likely that it'll act like a non intelligent hunk of rock going through some random trajectory.
It's less silly to declare you'll win the lottery. That has happened many times over - but we're yet to discover that can or has existed outside of Earth. While it's nearly impossible it hasn't happened several times over, it's so far impossible that we've encountered even the crumbiest excuse for life.
I assert that it is silly. We're not indigenous American happening upon European settlers. We're indigenous Americans wandering about the continent harassing mammoths, inventing stories of how it'll go when it happens.
By sending out a pulse of light they could not just light up the ship-facing side of objects but also determine their precise location and velocity. Seems like something you'd want to do to not waste your thousand-year mission by accidentally colliding with a dark object.
The Wow! signal could be just such an event.
Aliens might use some type of scanning beam rather than a big flash, but I doubt we have the 1977 data to differentiate between a beam scanning our area and a solar-system-wide flash.
What do you think the natural spectrum of the Wow signal was, for determining amount of blue shift? What resolution of spectral data do you think we have on it?
Even if this was a scanning beam I think we can assume it would take a lot of energy and so may be based on a simple scalable physical process. Using hydrogen to create it makes sense as it is low mass and can be replenished.
Loeb is, to be very clear: unintelligent and unscientific. He has no desire to actually test the theories he publishes, and because of that, most of the theories are literally untestable. He just wants to shit-publish wild ideas, which is totally fine, if we were talking about a blog or something of that similar caliber. But that would not attract the $$$ views he demands to afford his lifestyle.
He got attention for writing about this for Oumuamua, and now he’s just rinsing and repeating for 3I/Atlas. It’s exactly like any youtuber chasing the most effective clickbait.
It’s like when Altman talks about AIs building a Dyson sphere. Everyone with any understanding of the issues knows it’s self-serving hype.
He's convinced it's an essentially a local phenomenon. I look forward to how he spins this paper.